Skyrim Special Edition - What are the most demanding graphic settings?

[greenknight]

I tried to play around with settings a bit but I can't find anything that stabilizes my performance. From what I understand the game is using the same engine as Fallout 4 now.

Which is weird, because I was able to play Fallout 4 mostly smoothly at close to maxed settings. I tried to turn godrays and shadows down a notch or two like I did in Fallout but to no avail.

In the original Skyrim I was playing at constant 60fps with everything maxed, and a couple mods and the texture patch. Which settings have you found the most demanding?


edit: My gpu is a oc'ed 270x. I know you may think it shouldn't run this game well, but it runs more graphically intense games like Witcher 3 well at 40-50fps(that most importantly FEEL smoother than 40 in Skyrim SE) and Fallout 4 which is similar to Skyrim but much more detailed and geometrically complex at 50-60, just doesn't make sense to me.

[name_goes_here]

I was googling looking for settings for my weaker rig when I found your post and also found this https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/59rsj0/for_those_with_low_fps_in_special_edition/

I didn't try it because I know my issue is a weaker rig, but it might be something for you to look into since you seem to be fine in those other games.

[Vagrant]

Ultra Shadow Quality/Distance & Ultra Godrays.

Having these 3 settings on Ultra drops my FPS and makes the game stutter. If I just turn these down to High and leave everything else on Ultra, I can still get a solid 60 FPS almost everywhere.

Win 7 64x
8gb RAM
nvidia 560 ti (2gb)
intel i3-4150 @3.50ghz (dual core, 4 threads)

[Washell]

Levels, or in this case area's of the world are designed with the capabilities of the hardware and game engine in mind. You don't stick a hundred trees in an area when the graphical fidelity you're aiming for means that brings the FPS to a crawl. In this case, all the design tailored to the older version of the engine was ported to a newer version of the engine, with far too many things causing shadows, godrays, or appearing on screen.

Fallout 4, with its bare trees and all that, can get away with more. Oldrim needed exponentially less gpu power for each object on screen. Witcher 3 takes an entirely different approach to building the world that comes with its own pros and cons.

TL;DR: Porting the old stuff to a new engine comes with a ton of inefficiency that means you need more raw power to smooth things out.

[Rafael Freeman]

It's been 14 days, so hopefully the OP has found a solution or has moved on :-)

Anyway, on a weak system Godrays should be disabled, and shadow distance and quality should be set to low. Medium settings for everything else. After that it's experimenting to see if the system can deal with better settings.

And unlike TW3, Skyrim SE is taxing the CPU.